


season 9, day x, as told from the shadows by mike townsend

by showzen



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Mike Townsend has ADHD, Seattle Garages (Blaseball Team)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:15:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26996533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/showzen/pseuds/showzen
Summary: Mike Townsend wanders the dark, fuzzy innards of the Garages’ home stadium. Everything is inky-black.(or: mike townsend did what he had to do, and now he's ready to come home)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 38





	season 9, day x, as told from the shadows by mike townsend

Mike Townsend wanders the dark, fuzzy innards of the Garages’ home stadium. Everything is inky-black. He can see—sort of—but it's all so _dark_ and staticky, like how inside looks when you've just been out on a sunny day. The contrast isn't there, and it leaves everything muddy. He has the inexplicable urge to cut the mids, whatever that means here. He can feel everything. He can see everything. And yet again, he can see nothing at all.

Most of all, he's alone. He thinks. Sometimes he sees people wandering alongside him, out of the corner of his eye, who disappear suddenly when he looks directly at them. Someone smells of weed. Then someone else of smoke. Slivers of sensory input are all he has to go on here.

The first thing he's figured so far is that this place is like the reverse of Seattle. Like, real Seattle. It's darker and more distorted, but decidedly is the stadium—he sees on the wall here where his initials are scratched in next to TC and LA, on the bench there where he stubbed his toe once and kicked the leg wonky.

The second thing he's figured is this: you know how sometimes if you're walking through somewhere that's haunted, you'll walk through a cold spot, and you'll shiver and you know you just walked through a ghost? It's like that, and sometimes he thinks he walks through his teammates. Sometimes he goes and stands on the mound, under the motionless greyscale clouds—you know, for old times sake—and he knows when a game starts, because suddenly he'll be taking up the same space as Arturo, and he knows it's Arturo, he can feel the TV static in his chest and the whine of an amp in his skull. He wonders if Arturo knows it's him, too.

He senses them occasionally, just walking around the place. When he walks through Teddy, he feels the tendons in his left arm tightening like guitar strings being tuned. He'll pass through Malik, and his skull will fill with the pound of nightcore like a jug fills with water. It gives him a headache sometimes. Even the newer players, the ones he never got to meet, he knows who they are—OLL-E is vinyl crackle and tinny hi-hats, Paula is the stretching and popping of a tree growing in a thousand times speed, Durham is discordant synth pads and soft static. Weirdly, he likes it when he passes through them. It feels almost like he’s there with them. It’s really embarrassing, but sometimes when he can feel one of them nearby, he talks to them, even though he knows they can’t hear him.

The only one he doesn't like is Jaylen. And he feels bad, because he'd like to reconnect with her, really, he would! He always got along with Jaylen, back when they were all stupid, scrappy kids just starting out. But when she walks through him he hears silence—more than silence, more like an all-swallowing void that kills sound—and he feels blood—running hot and sticky down his arms and his back and soaking into his shirt—and he sees red—a localised sunset enlivening the room like a lucid nightmare—and he gets _angry._ Violently so. It’s not an emotion he’s used to.

And then she walks away, and it all subsides, like the ebbing of the briefest wave on the shore of the Puget Sound. He wonders what it’s like to be her. He wonders if the things he hears about her on the snippets of radio he gets from OLL-E sometimes are true.

The third thing he's figured is that he can get back. Not permanently, or anything like that, but if it's quiet and dark and lonely enough somewhere on the surface, he can break through, just for a little while. Sometimes for a long while, depending on how long he goes undiscovered. One of his favourite spots is in the instrument closet, where an amp casts a perfect shadow against the wall and behind a chunky bass, blocking it off from the rest of the room even when the light’s on. It’s a tight fit, but surprisingly comfortable if he curls his legs up just right. It’s funny—people will pop in and out to grab instruments, and they never even know he’s there.

He likes to hang out in the tool shed too. It’s the perfect vantage point for watching games—close enough to be able to properly, y’know, watch, but the windows are so murky that even if someone looked right in, they wouldn’t really be able to see him. There’s few things more annoying, in Mike’s experience, than being launched back into the shadows mid-game because someone throws a passing glance your way.

Sometimes he sits under the bleachers and listens to the team gossip. He stifles laughter when each one of them swears up and down they saw Mike Townsend leaving the locker room, or no, you're wrong, he was manning the concessions stand, or, no, seriously, you guys, they heard him singing in the closet. 

He's not sure why he stifles it. Their knowledge of his presence, or lack thereof, feels like a precarious balancing act. Jaylen being there means he _can’t_ be there, and that means if he _is_ there, something’s wrong, and it all gets very confusing and he doesn’t like to think what would happen if the Gods were so inclined to address that imbalance.

Anyway, Mike Townsend is wandering the dark, fuzzy innards of the Garages’ home stadium when he realises with a jolt what time it must be in the real world. He rounds a corner and rushes to the nearest clock, hands rattling around in its face as it melts off the wall. The first hand clicks past the flifth dot, then the thlird, and yes, he’s right—ten minutes to the final game of the playoffs. He doesn’t want to miss this.

Mike squeezes his eyes shut. Moments later, he opens them, and glances around at the only half-familiar walls of Choux Stadium. See, that’s one of the positives of the Shadows.

It takes him a couple of minutes of running into walls and dead ends, but eventually he makes it out onto the field. It’s empty—obviously—but he can sense the energy, feels it running through him like an electrical current.

He goes to stand on the mound first, see if he can’t figure out who’s pitching. He knows most of the other pitchers well, even if they’re on different teams. Pitchers’ code, he and Tot always called it, said you gotta be nice to them no matter who won. It’s like a bond that the whole league shares.

A warm pool of water, only minorly disturbed, a tiny droplet hitting the surface, sending out ripples, under the surface, on the surface. Mike furrows his brow, and then it hits him. Ah! Of course. Cornelius Games. A strong choice against the Crabs. He can’t help but smile to himself—he loves a good underdog story. Besides, Jaylen’s a Shoe Thief now. He feels guilty for being almost glad that he doesn’t have to accidentally walk through her anymore, but—hey, he can root for her team still, right?

He spends a little while wandering the edges of the field, trying to find some dark and un-looked at spot he can chill in to watch the game. It’s odd, because you would think there wouldn’t be all too many what with it being maybe the most watched game of the year, but he has an instinct for these things, so he steps into one up by the nosebleeds and just _knows_ that nobody’s looking at him, so he shuts his eyes and pushes through to the real world.

The noise is immediate and overwhelming. He’s spent so much time in complete silence that most sound can make him flinch these days, but this is—so much. _So_ much. He claps his hands over his ears.

The game is a good one. He spends a lot of it being bounced to and from the Shadows, which isn’t his favourite and makes him a little bit nauseous by the end, but it’s worth it to see the Thieves pull the win from the jaws—or, he supposes, claws—of defeat in the last inning. Mike’s never been a big ‘cheering’ guy, but he can’t help but let out a little _whoop-whoop_ as the game closes up.

And then something happens.

He catches a glimpse of a giant, rotating shape in the sky, and for a moment feels so very watched before he falls back into the silence and stillness of the Shadows. It’s not the same, though. He can feel the Shelled One talking, a booming, reverberating tone, deep in his chest. He can’t quite make out the words, but he strains hard, hopping down the steps. He wants to know. He needs to know.

_I ...M HE...E_

_…ND Y…U ARE OUT_

He doesn’t need to catch all of it to understand. Fear and blood roars in his ears like a roiling sea. He stumbles his way down to the field, rushes left and right, arms wheeling frantically. Trying to catch anyone, anyone at all, trying to figure out _what on Earth is going on._

His arm swings through someone!— _blood and void and red_ —and then again his head— _migraine and red and cracking_ —and he trips and falls and slides through another— _silence and noise and RED_.

This isn’t right. Who are these people?

Who were these people?

He pulls himself to his feet and runs as fast as he can to the mound. First, it’s more of _that_ —blood pouring from his nose, his mouth, in freefall, hands grasping in desperation and fury at his ankles, mechanical engine snarling like a wild animal—but he holds his ground, even as his knees give out and his body threatens to collapse.

By his count it’s been one inning already. This is the second. That motor, that snarling, roars itself away, and with it goes the red, the blood. He survived. He prays to the gods—or, well, maybe that’s not the best idea given the circumstances—that whoever comes next doesn’t kill him.

They don’t. In fact, he knows this person, particularly well. Their aura is different to what it once was. Instead it’s all clear. A piercing yellow glow. The clunk of those great big stadium lights turning on. The soft whine of feedback from a dropped microphone.

“Jaylen,” he says softly.

He imagines her standing there on the mound, facing off against—whatever it is she’s facing off against—more like her old self than ever. He closes his eyes.

When he opens them, for just a moment, he’s her.

He sees the sky, a rich and striking red-magenta. He sees blood dripping from the scoreboard, from the evacuated stands. He sees, is that York Silk? at bat, eyes pulsating crimson, face unusually, deathly serious. He sees to his left, Peanutiel Duffy on first base, and to his right, Wyatt Pothos on third.

He looks up and he sees the Peanut, rotating in the sky, howling taunts and terrors down at the field.

He hums to himself a familiar old song, but not the version you know. “Well, we’re gonna, fight gods, fight gods, and we’re gonna win”, he mumbles, the cadence just a little off, picturing Teddy’s lyrics-workshopping vocals and out-of-tune guitar, and it comes out in Jaylen’s voice, and he feels speed and fire and virtue and _hope_ course fiercely through his blood.

And then Mike Townsend blacks out.

—

When he wakes up, he’s himself again, and all is, once again, normal. He’s on his back in the middle of the field, staring at the motionless clouds.

Well, that was something.

He sits up and rubs his forehead. A migraine’s forming, he thinks, squeezing the offending eye shut, and momentarily laments the lack of painkillers here.

He blinks away bleariness and casts his gaze off across the field.

That’s when he notices the bump.

“Huh,” he says.

 _The bump_ is in fact, a bump on the ground, which wasn’t there when he fell asleep—passed out—he doesn’t think. It’s almost like an odd, visual glitch in the ground—it’s not like a lump of earth, or a molehill, or anything natural like that. It looks like something else is trying to come up through the soil, something like an inky-black mass of Shadows. When he looks at it from this angle, it looks almost rounded, but tipping his head just a little to the left, it suddenly forms sharp points and layers. Like a 2D object trying and failing to be 3D.

All things considered, it would be stupid to go up and do something like, oh, Mike doesn’t know, touch it. But he’s currently in a situation where, last he remembers, he basically possessed his old team’s undead ex-pitcher while she played ball against a malevolent god. He doesn’t know why, but it somehow feels like less of a risk than it would’ve a day or two ago.

So, fuck it. Mike stands up—whoa, dizzy, hang on—and makes his way over to the bump. He peers down at it. It looks even weirder from this angle, like staring into a starless kaleidoscope. A rush of apprehension suddenly overcomes him, but before he can convince himself otherwise, he reaches out to grab it.

It reaches out to grab him back.

Mike shrieks as a shadowy hand wraps itself around his wrist. He flails frantically for a moment as it starts to _pull him in and then_ —oh. 

It’s someone. He hears the _beep-bee-bee-beep_ of a telegraph key, and an oddly familiar tune in the background. Is that… Moist Mouth? That Canadian Smash Mouth cover band? He has a vague memory of heckling their shows with the rest of the Garages whenever they played in Halifax.

Now, who was that guy who was their frontman?

…

Mike’s been pulled halfway through the ground now, he notices abruptly. It’s alright, though. He knows he’s in the hands of a friend.

—

Mike wakes up splayed out on his back, again. He’s getting kinda sick of this.

At least his head isn’t hurting this time. He sits up. Looks at his surroundings. And does a double take.

He’s in the instrument closet. Like, the _real_ one, in the real Big Garage, in real Seattle.

Holy shit.

He presses his hands to his face, works his fingers against the bone underneath. The _real_ bone. His _real face._

He’s real. He’s _real_ again.

Suddenly, his left hand stiffens up as the tendons in his arm begin to tighten. He looks up at the door just as it swings open to reveal Theodore Duende.

For a moment, they just stand there staring at each other. Teddy looking dumbfounded, mouth hanging a little open, as he freezes mid-stride into the closet, and Mike sitting cross-legged on the floor nursing a cramping claw-hand.

“Hi, Teddy,” Mike ventures.

“Hi, Mike,” Teddy replies, still agape. “The… the blessing went through?”

Huh. A blessing. He hadn’t thought of that, but it makes sense. He makes a noncommittal gesture. “Guess so.”

Mike squints a little as a pounding, distorted beat begins to beat at his brain stem, followed quickly by a squeaky synth and a chirrupy voice. “Hi, Malik,” he says, moments before the person in question pokes his head around the doorframe to investigate the sound of a familiar voice. 

Mike barely has time to register Teddy’s brow furrowing in confusion before Malik comes at him full speed, a huge, toothy grin plastered across his face. “Mike!” He squeals, launching himself bodily towards him.

Fortunately, Malik’s not a big guy, so Mike stumbles backwards but doesn’t fall as his teammate clings to him in a tight hug.

“Hi, Malik,” he repeats, smiling, as he returns the hug. Malik doesn’t let go. Mike accepts that he just has a catboy hanging off of him now.

Teddy, finally, crosses the room towards him. Without a word, he wraps his arms around Mike (and Malik) and hugs him hard. Mike feels Malik’s purr reverberate against his chest.

Alright. This is good.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading!! i'm seb#2979 in the blaseball discord, feel free to come and chat!


End file.
